131214840-Carl-Schmitt

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ment and plebiscitary democracy. Moritz Julius Bonn agreed with him that "there is a
parliamentarism without democracy" 82 but resisted Schmitt's reduction of parliament to the
principles of openness and discussion. He also objected to the concept of discussion
advanced by Schmitt in Parlamentarismus. According to Bonn, "parliamentary discussion is
not only discussion that wants to persuade the opponent of the falsehood of his views, but a
discussion whose purpose is give-and-take, negotiation. . . . I am certain that there has always
been a very close connection between ideologies and interests in parliamentarism, especially
in tax matters. The two businessmen you talk about act in a thoroughly recognizable manner
as parliamentarians in the most glorious age of the old parliamentarism." 83 Whereas Schmitt
had asserted in Politische Theologie that "the opposite of discussion is dictatorship," 84 Bonn
wrote to him that "the proponents of dictatorship also want discussion, first of all because
men are gregarious by nature." Further, the essence of parliamentary government was not
"discussion'' in Schmitt's sense, but something closer to "conference"; the opposite of this is
"government by violence." 85
Later in the 1920s, Hermann Heller's critique of Schmitt's Begriff des Politischen (1927),
"Politische Demokratie und soziale Homogenität" (1928), while critical of Schmitt's principle
of substantial social homogeneity in democracy, accepted the most important element in
Schmitt's analysis. 86 Heller too emphasized the role of political values in democracy as living
factors in its success, but he pushed Schmitt's argument further:
Actually the intellectual [geistesgeschichtliche] basis of parliamentarism is not the belief in public
discussion as such, but belief in the existence of a common ground for discussion and in fair play for
the opponent, with whom one wants to reach agreement under conditions that exclude naked force. 87
Although Heller agreed that "a certain degree of social homogeneity is necessary for the
construction of democratic unity," he insisted that "it can never mean the elimination of the
necessarily antagonistic social structure." 88 Any attempt to remove these conflicts on the
basis
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